THE PROGRAMMERS PLAYGROUND - I O ABSTRACTION FOR USER-CONFIGURABLE DISTRIBUTED APPLICATIONS/

I/D abstraction is offered as a new high-level approach to interproces s communication. Functional components of a distributed system are wri tten as encapsulated modules that act upon local data structures, some of which may be published for external use. Relationships among modul es are specified by logical connections among their published data str uctures. Whenever a module updates published data, I/O takes place imp licitly according to the configuration of logical connections. The Pro grammers' Playground, a software library and runtime system supporting I/O abstraction, is described. Design goals include the separation of communication from computation, dynamic reconfiguration of the commun ication structure, and the uniform treatment of discrete and continuou s data types. Support for end-user configuration of distributed multim edia applications is the motivation for the work.